Locked On

A Jack Ryan Novel

By: Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney

Narrated by: Lou Diamond Phillips

Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Jack Ryan Jr.--along with the covert warriors of the Campus--continues to uphold his legendary father’s legacy of courage and honor in this thriller from number one New York Times bestselling author Tom Clancy.

Privately training with special forces, he’s honing his combat skills to continue his work within the Campus, hunting down and eliminating terrorists wherever he can--even as Jack Ryan Sr. campaigns to become President of the United States again.

But what neither father nor son knows is that the political and personal have just become equally dangerous. A devout enemy of Jack Sr. launches a privately-funded vendetta to discredit him and connect him to a mysterious killing in his longtime ally John Clark’s past. All they have to do is catch him.

With Clark on the run, it’s up to Jack Jr. to stop a growing threat emerging in the Middle East, where a corrupt Pakistani general has entered into a deadly pact with a fanatical terrorist to procure four nuclear warheads they can use to blackmail any world power into submission--or face annihilation.

©2011 Rubicon, Inc. (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Fast pace action

What a great story full of action and twists. I'm hooked and I look forward to the next book!

Excellent action story

I love all of the stories, but this one had a lot of action and I loved it. It was happening all over the place in different directions, and it was like a super action movie but with more details, of course. Looking forward to continuing with the next book on the series.

Beware the Liberal Menace!

I would not recommend this book. Mr. Clancy's characters are notoriously one-dimensional, and he has always been far more talented at describing the inner workings of an atomic bomb than he has the inner workings of a human being. For Clancy's stories to work they need to be set in a black and white world completely void of nuance. Locked On requires too much reliance on the gray area of politics.

Locked On is an interesting read if one has recently read Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Both that series and Locked On employ a far right-wing spy agency working outside the government. In Locked On, they are the good guys. As always, America is in mortal danger, this time on two fronts: from abroad, the evil Terrorists and at home, the even more evil Liberals. The Terrorists at least have a cause, they want to set up the Caliphate, certainly a despicable goal, but a goal nonetheless. The Liberals have no such goal. They just plain hate America, and want to destroy the government, even a liberal government. Here is where Mr. Clancy is at his weakest. He is simply in over his head when trying to describe a conflict of ideas, and his political subplot falls flat. His cartoonishly evil Liberals add laugh out loud comic relief - whether intended or unintended is not clear - as they try and destroy America, seemingly just because it's there.

Mr. Clancy's main character, Jack Ryan, Sr. may have finally outlived his usefulness to the series. I was a fan of the early novels, because that Jack Ryan was a bit of an underdog. He was out of his element, an ordinary man pushed to extraordinary action by circumstances beyond his control. Unfortunately, as he moved up the ladder and got more power, and more control, he became less sympathetic. By the end of Locked On, when President Ryan sends a helicopter and a phalanx of black-suited soldiers to arrest a sixty-year old woman, one has to worry about what the next four years under a Ryan administration will bring for those who disagree with the state. Jack's son, Jack, Jr. or Jack Ryan 2.0 is bound and determined not to be the underdog his father was. He's learning hand-to-hand combat. He's a key member of a team of assassins that misses the good old days of when they could just stab a man with a poison filled pen, and he beats a man's brains out on a marble floor.

On the bright side, no one tells a story better than Tom Clancy. His structure is always strong, and his pace is excellent. The action segments do not disappoint. Lou Diamond Phillips does a great job reading the book, and he slips in and out of the multitude of requisite accents flawlessly.

A hard to believe world.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I started listening to this after checking out Threat Vector. Honestly I think I might have been better off waiting for something after Threat Vector than making the mistake backtracking the series.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Kept the politics out of it. Although annoying and awkward I found it slightly funny the amount of conservative opinion Clancy put into this book. It almost seemed like he created his only personal crazy world where every conservative idea is right and every liberal idea is idiotic and dangerous. At some point I just started to fast forward the election parts, it was just too much, I felt like I was pulled out of an interesting story so an old angry dude could give me a crappy lesson about politics.

What does Lou Diamond Phillips bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Phillips does great voice work, the way he speaks each character lets me have a better time visualizing the characters. There is urgency when things go bad, and he doesn't overdo it.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Nope

Any additional comments?

I started with Threat Vector and I think I'm going to stop checking out the backlog. I had read Rainbow Six and Hunt for Red October and loved them. But I guess I missed the part where Clancy decided to turn his books from just talking about the specs and building the tension to making dumb jokes about MSNBC. But as I said before, I really liked Threat Vector. If he lays off the politics like in Threat Vector and keeps things focused on the story, maybe I might come back to this series.

Very disappointing

What did you like best about Locked On? What did you like least?

Expecting special ops story... Got a right wing extremist diatribe, not a fun listen for an independent thinker. Don't mind a sprinkle of politics in stories... But this was extreme. Listened half way, couldn't stomach it.. Deleted.

What about Lou Diamond Phillips’s performance did you like?

A+

Terrible performance speaks so fast I can't unders

Is there anything you would change about this book?

A better actor to narrate. Better develop characters. I can't understand narrator's words and he has no emotion in his speaking.

Has Locked On turned you off from other books in this genre?

Never buy anything narrated by Lou Diamond Phillips.

How could the performance have been better?

Please give us a better sample of the narration. I've read most of Tom Clancy's books and this one just doesn't measure up at all.

Did Locked On inspire you to do anything?

Check out narrator's past performance and sound.

Any additional comments?

I wasted almost $20.00 for a book I will never finish. I feel cheated!

GOOD

Any additional comments?

help- there must be a way to return to a specific chapter in audio books, if you are near the end and accidentally loose your place you have to go back to begiining skip from Chapter 1 to 73 one at a time to reach your last place read - not great

Clancy continues to phone it in

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Only if they're a long-time Clancy fan, like I am... or rather, was; I keep checking out his new stuff, hoping for a gripping technothriller like "Hunt for Red October" or "Sum of All Fears."

What was most disappointing about Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney ’s story?

This is another disjointed, barely-credible fantasy story about a super-secret organization, staffed with ex-CIA operatives, whose hackers are SO GOOD they can routinely surf the inner sanctums of the CIA and NSA, and whose financial analysts are SO GOOD they can make enough money to infinitely fund this shadow organization off the books, and who can zip into any country, anywhere in the world, and torture or kill any Bad Guy they feel like. While their foreign opponents are, in some ways, remotely credible, their domestic opposition -- namely, the party that Jack Ryan Sr does not belong to -- are invariably cartoonish, feeble, and so mind-bogglingly inept, that I'm reminded of 1930s/40s propaganda pieces from both the Allies and the Axis. An example: While the love interest of Jack Ryan Jr is beautiful, young, brilliant, and perfectly fit -- and so chaste that she doesn't kiss on the first date -- the only other woman in the story with more than a few lines (a lawyer from the ACLU) is old, fat, ugly and corrupt, and determined to get Osama bin Laden (or at least a thinly disguised version) not only out of prison, but into bed. It's amateurish, which is a shame, since much of the story is actually quite interesting.But not all. A key scene, which one would think would be the apex of the action, involves two heroes trying to disarm a nuclear weapon. Instead of building the tension, the situation resolves itself "off screen," and we are told that an expert called the heroes on their sat phone and told them the procedures. Whew! That was close!Finally, while Clancy managed to keep politics out of his works for his first 20 years, lately he's obsessed with it. He laid it on so thick this time that I actually found myself rooting against the heroes, namely Jack Ryan and John Clarke. Ryan comes off especially as an angry, bitter, arrogant jerk in this piece, a far cry from the brilliant but humble CIA analyst who found himself thrown into treacherous situations. Again, we don't know how much Tom Clancy actually contributes to his own works anymore; it's possible he outsourced the entire book.

What does Lou Diamond Phillips bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

LDP does a great job. I used to listen to the "Books on Tape" versions of TC novels back in the casette days, and Michael Prichard did a pretty good job with the narration, but LDP brings the dialogue to life. He's also pretty good at accents, and since most of the cast of "Locked On" is non-American, his work is cut out for him. Unfortunately, he only has one Russian accent, and sometimes it's difficult to tell the characters apart.

Do you think Locked On needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

No, but like a sucker, if there is a sequel, I'll pony up for it. I listen to these things during commutes, and you really don't want to listen to works that require a great deal of thought when you're in heavy Beltway traffic. TC has always been pretty good for that sort of thing, and despite the serious and repeated shortcomings of his later works (or, more likely the shortcomings of his ghostwriter).

Conservative Republican Political Garbage (CRPG)

Over the years I have both read and listened to Tom Clancy military techno thrillers plus the various movies based .. . This time around I was astounded by the sheer amount CRPG foisted onto us listeners. I reckon this may well be a combination of Clancy and Greeny. No more future time will be spent listening to either of these writers. They're off my wish list

confusing but good.

confusing so many names and people but ended fine. narration fair. ending needed improvement, but I know it carries over in next book.